On AI Art and Creativity

This is nowhere close to being a scientific article or technical documentation. It is more of an essay exploring some of the recent feelings and insights I myself started to have about the emergence of AI Art and it is a result of me being exposed to its existence, be it in my capacity as Creative Director, Artist and Game Developer, in my “role” as human being engaging with art and creative output of others or simply as person existing in the heavily digitalized society of today.

None of these findings will feel incredibly unique or innovative, nor am I probably the first person to express them. But they came to me on a Tuesday Morning, while holding a cup of tar black coffee and gazing into the early spring sun, which made them feel significant.

As a Game Designer who also works a serious amount of time in the technical aspects of making games and software engineering, I am used to work in fields that some people could consider the forefront of modern technologies, such as Newest Gen Realtime 3D applications, whilst also pushing products to emerging hardware tech such as AR- and VR glasses. For years, I would never have considered myself a strongly outspoken critic of modern technologies and the tech industry itself. This has changed in the recent times.
There is something about the recent developments in Gen-AI, which push heavy into the creative fields and strive to replace writers, illustrators, film makers, musicians, thats urges me to criticise, to speak up. As someone who has always felt the need, this inner hunger to create and express themselves, the emergence of this “Creativity on Demand” at best feels weird and icky and at worst makes me question the point of my own creativity. On the less philosophical side, AI Art directly threatens some of the ways I come up with rent every month or at least threatens to make my job significantly more dull, stressful, sped-up and un-humanized. There is tons to be said about the role of tools under Capitalism (whether AI qualifies as a tool is another topic far too vast for this rather personal essay) and how facilitation of work under our current system only threatens those dependant on work for survival, instead of advancing towards a society where we all have to work less for the same output. But personally, I rather want to focus this essay on the topic of AI Art as the ultimate commodification of Art and Creativity and the impact this commodification will have on culture, society and humanity in total.

As a creative person, it seems easy to fall into a certain kind of dread, looking at the speed of developments with newest technolgies in generative AI, whose outputs seem to sprout everywhere one looks.
To quote Fredric Jameson: “[…]It is easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of Capitalism.” It seems to me, it has also become easier to imagine the end of all sorts of shared, publicly available human creative work than any of these companies halting and reconsidering pushing Gen-AI- Art on us (because yes, despite what they are saying about its inevitability, its existence is a product of them pushing it to markets, not any kind of preprogrammed evolutionary step of our species). Now, no doubt people will keep picking up pencils, plucking on guitar strings and cooking spinach pesto on late Wednesday nights. It is so deeply engraved in our bones, this need to do, to express, to leave a mark on this universe which is so indifferent to our existence and will wash away our traces in the sea of entropy yet to come.
Still, Gen AI seriously threatens the public sphere of human creativity by its shear force in number and scale. One only has to take a glimpse on the current Amazon warehouse feed (not traditionally recognized as a bastion of human creativity, yet still a place that once needed people making 3D renderings, photographs and writing store texts for the products on sale) to understand the impending flood of “content noise” that is only starting to happen. Sure, you could argue that there is not much humanity to be lost in a single 160 digit store text being generated instead of authored by a human. This might be true for a single instance. But a million store texts? A billion? An internet so full with generated text, one would be foolish to assume that any writing is anything less than generated on demand, potentially only for the current viewer themselves? What if human creativity becomes so rare, so erringly drowned in all this noise that it is pushed out of the public by weight alone? To clear up some potential confusion here: I am far from using the idea of the public interchangeably with the internet. The net-sphere solely serves as a means of example, albeit the potentially most drastic one. But one might as well ask themselves what happens to printed press, powerpoint presentations and that one poetry book collecting dust on the nightstand if, just by economy of scale, one has to assume that not a speck of human driven creativity and output is left in them. As someone who actively works in various creative fields, I can reassure that those processes are already turning their gears, gnawing away human creative output, word for word, megabyte by megabyte.
“Apocalypses aren’t events you mark on your calendar”, game designer Brian Bucklew on twitter once tweeted. “They happen inch by inch. An old man fades away in the summer heat. A house slips down the mud into the silty river. A grain of sand untouched since the first human stood is plucked away by a burgeoning sea. Each a trumpet.” I think what they are getting at is: We want to think of disasters as this one time events, instead of recognizing them in the patterns around us that are happening constantly. Gen AI pushing out human creativity from the public is not going to happen. It is already happening.

I strongly belief there is something earnest to be lost here if human creativity has to retreat into its burrows of private life and small friend circles. It is my deepest belief that if there is ever something which you could call “the meaning of life”, we find it in the connections to other humans and our relationships with one another. Art and creative work of any kind are heavily interconnected with this. They make us bond, they make us share. My relationships are filled with exchanged songs that none of the involved have written, I have lost myself countlessly in the movements of a 4AM dancefloor and I still recall beating the final boss together with a close friend on a spring night four years ago. Those things exist and strengthen my relationships because people have committed a larger part of their life to honing these crafts, to express themselves through the medium of their choice. They are interesting to engage with in their imperfections, their inherent humanity. If I choose to go dancing, meddling myself with those dark, lovable masses of people far past midnight, I am not there to have an algorithm pick out songs to play. I am there for somebody, a human, who put their creative mind to task, to play carefully selected music. On their selection, the entire sum of their existence is weighing down upon. Every single second of their life, every past experience has led them to craft up exactly the music they are serving right now. It is easy to forget, but framed like this, there is an almost religious note to any kind of creative endeavour. As other humans feel the same need for music and therefore end up in the same dark cellar, we connect, we intertwine, under the blanket of this creative act in a public space. We end up becoming friends, going to dinner parties, making out, arguing, hugging and crying; we live our lives as human beings together. In Game Design theory, a process which reinforces itself is called a positive feedback loop. It seems reasonable to declare one: Humans make art. This connects humans and creates more opportunity and space for the act of being a human. Part of this “act of being human” is to make more art, to express humanity all over again. If I hang a poster on the wall, I surely choose it for aesthetic reasons but equally because it inspires me and connects me with an artist and in a almost final act, because it links me to other people through the act of celebrating this art. In this inspiration and celebration I find my own will to create. This is such a tremendously human process, it feels impossible to strip out of our lived experience. And yet, I strongly consider it threatened. There is an irrational, transcendental aspect to the way creativity shapes and reacts to our humanity and vice versa that my rational ego in someway refused to accept for quite a long time. Now that I see it endangered, I feel strongly compelled to point it out, even if it is stating the obvious.
To make a simpler argument about the absurdity of trying to outsource human creativity, one can try to map the upcoming structures and processes to the realm of sports. Equally to the creative fields (partially because you can easily consider the two of them being the same) sports serve as an celebration of our humanity. We bond over soccer matches, we push our bodies up alpine peaks, we walk five minutes around the neighbourhood. In all these examples, there is connection with other humans, inspiration, celebration (of our bodies). I do not want to outsource my upcoming bike trip this summer, because the bike trip itself is the thing I long to do, not the output of a bike being driven for x amount of kilometers. I do not want to marvel at robots scoring perfect upper right corner goals. That achievement might be technologically interesting, but it lacks the inspiration of a human football player managing the same.

In the 1938 book “Homo Ludens”, Johan Huizinga goes great lengths to illustrate how the concept of “play” is fundamental to all human — and even non-human — life, even existing outside of the concept of culture and predating it. It is a concept which contains its own reason of existence, absent of all need to define its goals and therefore in fundamental opposition to the concept of “work”. One can try and place the idea of creativity into the realm of Huizinga’s play concept and will find that great parts of it align with it, seem to stem from it. Like play, creativity is often an act that stands for itself, that grows from itself, absolved from a higher reason to pursue it. One only once needs to feel this raging fire of self expression to understand the point here. On a more technical note, creativity as a concept stemming from play even boils down in linguistic concepts across many languages, e.g the act of playing an instrument or play in theatre, where clearly language underlines the playful nature of creative endeavours. As again, play is to be considered fundamentally opposed from the concept of work, of needing to do something for external purpose, maybe so is creativity. A more rational me could try and argue for a probable strong evolutionary advantage for species which develop play and in direct succession, culture and creativity and therefore giving it an outside purpose, survival. But this way of thinking will only make the coming arguments more pressing, so let us hold onto this worldview as well.

If you do not follow Huizinga’s worldview, it is easy to regard creativity as work, labor, as something to be outsourced and in its final logic, to strip out the costly humanity from the process.
“Yet this turn […] from engagement to spectatorship, is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist realism”, Mark Fisher writes in his book “Capitalist Realism”. One can only look at the movement towards AI Art and immediately see this pattern. Remove all artistry, all craftsmanship from creative work, and make it solely about a quick, but most importantly, sellable output, for which the human artist only has to be a spectator for. You should be grateful that a robot now writes your poetry, because now you can generate it and simply select what seems okay, and therefore make more. Powerful forces in our current world regard the removal of anything human from a concept as the ultimate goal, because humans complicate processes, slow them down, bargain for better salaries. The recent WGA strikes and the threat they pose to the Hollywood companies illustrate the power human workers still have if they bond together. So why have a person be creative if a robot can do the work of a thousand people? If the work it produces is 50% worse, but costs a fraction of a dollar, the deal is done. It strips away any of Huizinga’s ideas of play, of self-contained reason and replaces it with the naked logic of it being a piece of work for whose output one needs to optimize for. However, optimizing for said output is not the only process happening here. It also ultimately commodifies creativity itself, turns the act of creation itself into a good which can be bought and sold in the market. Why spend years learning and honing a craft for no reward except the art and the process itself, if you can just buy credits and spend two hours generating the images of your dreams? It does not strike as particularly new symptom that almost every aspect of our lives is under threat of being split up into small, tradable chunks. Maybe the speed with which these symptoms marched onto human creativity is what is new and scary.
“In each molecule of our life you find this cashier who sums up whether things pay off in the moment. Even intimate feelings are just a matter of cost-reward”, Antilopen Gang, a german political rap group once wrote in one of their songs. In the light of recent developments, one can only wonder whether they saw the same forces coming for their artistic work. Given the speed of it all, I highly doubt it. AI Art now seems as the logical endpoint of creativity under Late Stage Capitalism, but only now that it is here. The idea of eliminating this part of our existence through Gen-AI seemed less prevalent in the early 2000s, where tales of robots replacing humans as objects in the physical world seemed more prominent, taking up care work, serving in restaurants and layering bricks on construction sites.

There is a certain irony in the fact that the very same forces that now threaten human creative work completely depend on it, feed on its creations and digest them and then form them into this content noise that now piles up, making up the tsunami we are all already drowning in. Even rejecting all previous arguments, this must feel deeply unfair to a lot of people.
It also seems important to stress at this point, that this impending commodification of human creativity is not about democratising it, neither is it making it more accessible, which both seem to be a quite popular argument. If you don’t pay for generation credits, someone has to, even if it is just through the gigantic ecological cost coming from this newly built server farms and if you do pay for the credits, you have to see the underlining gatekeeping happening. This only represents the start point of human creativity as an object you can rent. Don’t forget to pay your monthly subscription, or you won’t be able to generate your pretty drawings anymore. Furthermore, art itself is already heavily democratised through the works of millions of creators tutorialising and sharing resources, talking about their processes and inviting others into their celebration of human existence. What remains inaccessible to many is the access to resources on societal level, such as free studying at art schools, financial stability in a broader scheme or even just a strong social reputation for the concept of being an artist in the first place. The fact that those algorithms also come with the heavy burden of censorship — through not allowing any kind of uncomfortable art as output which might not align with “company guidelines” or “safe-for-work” policies — should also serve as an eye opener regarding their claims of making art “accessible”. No, you cannot generate your flyer that calls for a pro-bicycle demonstration in your hometown, it is against our political guidelines. How very accessible.

To summarise, the looming and slow replacement of human creativity in the public sphere attacks a fundamental part of our humanity, of our joy of existence, whilst in the same breath threatens to remove any traces of human skill, artistry and knowledge from the world. Confronted with the choice of using these “tools” or not, we should constantly ask ourselves what purpose they serve and what purpose we intend to serve with them.

A close friend and fellow creative once told me that he had had the following revelation quite some time ago. It came to him that money, fame and success are not the goals of working creatively with other people, but instead vice versa: Under our current system, one often needs money and success (and potentially fame) to pursue the constant, on-going goal of working and creating with interesting people, the goal of this celebration of existence. To me, this idea fundamentally changed my view on my own creative process and maybe this is what lies at the center of the AI art issue too: To commodify human expression, to view it as labor needing to be done is a fundamental misunderstanding of why we choose to do so in the first place. The longer we refuse to take up this attitude towards human creativity as something essential to our existence, the less likely we will be to stop its erosion.

Sources:

Jameson, F. (2003). Future City. New Left Review. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii21/articles/fredric-jameson-future-city

Bucklew, B. (2021, September 27). https://twitter.com/unormal/status/1442353442983272448

Huizinga, J. (2016). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Angelico Press.

Antilopen Gang. (2015). Chocomel und Vla. JKP Jochens Kleine Plattenfirma GmbH & Co. KG.

Fisher, M. (2022). Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books.